The Best Quote of the RNC Convention

None of us have to settle for the best this administration offers – a dull, adventureless journey from one entitlement to the next, a government-planned life, a country where everything is free but us. ~ Paul Ryan

I do not want to live in a country where everything is free but us.

Steve Bridges as Barack Obama

The Obama administration has tried to put a stop to Bridges' act, because Obama has made it known that he is deeply offended. Yes, he's that good.

The problem with putting a stop to Bridges' act is that the first amendment prevents it. We'll see how long this video stays up on YouTube.

Bridges' act was in fact stopped when he died of natural causes just a few weeks ago. I really don't think it's a conspiracy, but it is a bit ironic.

Pants on Fire

From an email circulating on the internet. Thanks to Uncle Richard.

Honoring Neil Armstrong

Barack Obama is shown here honoring Neil Young Armstrong. Why is this about Barack Obama at all? As if he had anything to do with the moon landing. No, he shut down US space exploration. And... and... do you notice anything odd about the crescent moon and star? Why not a full moon? I realize that timing is everything, and they might not have a good publicity shot of Barack Obama when it's needed most, to honor an American hero with whom he had nothing to do.

I, on the other hand, lived this. I was in the seventh grade when Neil Young Armstrong walked on the moon. I shared their white knuckles as they nearly ran out of fuel looking for a place to land that wasn't covered in boulders. I watched with pride as they erected the Stars and Stripes. I held my breath as they threw the switch to lift off again. Would the rocket fire? It had been thoroughly tested, but...

Would the Lunar Excursion Module Ascent Stage tip over on lift off? My father was instrumental in the design and construction of the hardware that fed position information to the on-board guidance system (I hesitate to call it a computer) by metering the rate of deployment of small cables connected to the corners of the Descent Stage (the landing platform that stays on the moon). When they were safely away from the lunar surface, spring-loaded knives were supposed to cut the cables so that they wouldn't yank the Ascent Stage off course.

Everything had to work perfectly, or America would have two dead men sitting on the moon forever. It was unlikely that we would launch another mission to retrieve them if the first one failed.

After all that, Barack Obama gives us a picture of himself to honor Neil Young Armstrong. Big deal.

Note: Neil Young is an illiberal folk-rock singer/composer/guitarist. Neil Armstrong was the first human to walk on the moon. NBC reported Neil Armstrong's death at age 82 of heart complications as Neil Young. We can all breathe easier knowing that the illiberal folk-rock singer still lives.

Update: Check out Iowahawk.

Tax Internet Service?

The FCC wants you to pay for my internet service!

The Federal Communications Commission is eyeing a proposal to tax broadband Internet service.

The move would funnel money to the Connect America Fund, a subsidy the agency created last year to expand Internet access. (Read more...)

Here's a clue: There is no place on earth where you cannot get broadband internet service [satellite]. If you choose to live in a remote area, then you can expect to pay a little more for internet connectivity. Think of it as the price you pay for the luxury of living far away from the big city collectivists.

I have to wonder why government bureaucracies would even want to waste taxpayer dollars on rural internet service, when the Agenda 21 "pack'n'stack" goals for urban infill would chase most people out of the rural areas by the end of the century anyway. I guess it's a "belt and suspenders" kind of a thing -- in case liberty wins out, and we get to keep living where we want to live. Besides, what government agency gives a rat's ass about wasting taxpayer dollars?

I answered my own question. Forget I mentioned it.

You Didn't Conceive That

And you won't die from abortion. Someone else will.

You know... Oh, nevermind. The picture says it all. Courtesy of Hope n'Change.

Obama Campaign Stop Welcoming Committee

I'm sure demonstrations like this one accompany any campaign stop by either candidate, and this video probably accentuates the positive. Still, it's fun to watch.

And now, for something completely different:

I'm not sure what the "white ticket" banner is all about at 2:12. It really irks me that anyone is talking about race anymore. There seems to be a "culture of race" in this country that is simply used to divide people politically along racial lines. If you don't want to be a racist, simply stop looking at people through the damn lens of race!

What we have today isn't race war, it's culture war. People keep insisting on basing their culture along racial lines. A culture of individual freedom, liberty and responsibility benefits anyone of any race. Everyone has barriers to success, and they simply need to quit whining, and get to work to overcome them. The government can never help you be a truly successful person. It can only make you pathetically dependent on others.

In the free market, anyone who discriminates by race is shooting themselves in the foot. Their prosperity will suffer by alienating that sector of potential employees -- or potential customers. If they want to bite off their nose to spite their race, they only show their own stupidity -- and pay a very real price.

We abolished apartheid in this country in 1964. It has been more than 40 years -- two generations -- since we removed institutional racism in the United States. No classical liberal that I've ever met has the time or inclination to hold any other person back on account of race. We always wanted honest hard work to pay off, and for everyone to succeed.

Barack Obama's Weird Socialism -- The Movie

Last night, I went to see 2016: Obama's America. It's the first time I've set foot in a movie theater since I became disgusted by the high cost to view the overt left wing propaganda and gratuitous culture rot that Hollywood passes off as entertainment.

Within days of first listening to Barack Obama speak, and watching his presidential campaign unfold, I diagnosed him as a self-serving socialist sociopath. That brings us pretty close to having him figured out, but not entirely.

During Barack Obama's 2008 campaign, and early in his first term, many people were puzzled by his "apology tour", and with his apparent obsession with taking America down a notch on the world stage. Even while most socialist nations are quite nationalistic (e.g., Nazi Germany -- "Nazi" is the German-language diminutive for "National Socialist"), and the USSR (The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) was certainly aggressively nationalistic, Obama seems to want to implement a kind of meek socialism for the United States. It seems weird until you see the movie, 2016: Obama's America. I have read Dinesh D'Souza's articles about Barack Obama's dreams from his father before, so this wasn't news to me, but many people are getting this information for the first time.

Barack Obama senior was a rabid Kenyan anti-colonialist. He may have been justified to some degree. As Dinesh points out, our founders were also anti-colonialists. Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and others resented British colonialism in America. The dominant (some may say "hip") political ideology at the time was The Enlightenment, a.k.a., Classical Liberalism, which is where we got our founding principles of natural law, freedom and individual liberty, as most elegantly expressed in The Declaration of Independence and embodied in The Constitution of the United States.

The big difference with modern anti-colonialists is that the current hip political ideology is collectivism, a.k.a., communism, a.k.a., socialism. Once you understand that Barack Obama is attempting to fulfill his father's obsession, on which Obama has doubled down by obsessing over his father, then you understand Obama's agenda. The odd thing is, the United States was not founded on principles that would promote colonialism. Naturally as a world power, we do sometimes have to exert more influence worldwide than we might like, but as Colin Powell noted in 2003,

We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years and we've done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in, and otherwise we have returned home ... to live our own lives in peace.

For Barack Obama though, it doesn't help that he was mentored by communist, anti-colonialist, anti-American tutors, radical friends, radical ministers and radical professors. It isn't surprising that we have the most radical, most anti-American, anti-capitalist president in US history. What is stunning is that the media has so far downplayed these influences.

Fortunately, the movie 2016: Obama’s America has stunned Hollywood, opening at #1 in theaters on Friday. People will see it, and get the information that the mainstream media has strenuously attempted to suppress.

When All Else Fails, Manipulate the Data

My wife received an email from Washington Conservation Voters. It goes like this:

Did you know that here in Washington, unlike many other states, we elect a Commissioner of Public Lands? Well, we do. And this year’s race is going to be a doozy!

Sign our petition to show your commitment to Washington Forests.

Four years ago, Washington Conservation Voters helped elect Commissioner Peter Goldmark, a rancher from Eastern Washington, who committed to cleaning up shabby logging practices in forests around Washington, protecting Puget Sound, and addressing the challenges that climate change is bringing to our region.

Apparently, Goldmark’s commitment to clean water and healthy forests has angered one man: Clint Didier.

Didier, a tea-party activist and ex-NFL player, has run unsuccessfully for office before and this year he is challenging Goldmark. He has made it very clear that protecting the environment is not one of his values.

You say tea-party activist like it's a bad thing! Tea parties simply want to re-acquaint American citizens with our government's founding principles. If you disagree with the founding principles, why don't you just admit it? We the People should be able to protect the environment voluntarily, without forfeiting our inalienable rights. But you and Goldmark want to force everyone to do what you happen to think is right, when there is considerable latitude for honest people to disagree about what the problems are, and what the right solutions are. In a free country, private citizens would make those decisions. Does that guarantee success? Better than government, it usually turns out. The screed continues:

• In fact, he has said, the only way to make forests sustainable is “if Man puts his footprint back in the forest.”1
• Shockingly, he believes that “science has been altered so as to make it (global warming) look like it is truly happening.”2
• He believes that trying to protect our state’s waterways from herbicides and pesticides is elitist.3

Wow. Denying climate change. Opposing a healthy Puget Sound. Clint Didier, your policies are too extreme for Washington! Sign our petition and add your name to a growing list of Washingtonian committed to protecting our water and forests.

Wow. You say "denier" like it's a bad thing! What you call "denial", I call "skepticism", and skepticism has been the fundamental truth-detector in science since the discipline was first invented. The burden of proof is on the accuser. That applies to forestry, global warming and stormwater runoff.

What's more, the science has been altered! The famous hockey stick graph was falsified and the data manipulated to present the illusion of a correlation between human industrial activity, CO2 and global warming. So the correlation is much weaker than the IPCC claims, and as any decent scientist knows, correlation does not imply causation. There is no experiment that you could run that can reproducibly and reliably prove causation for global warming, if it exists at all. Why do we have to keep debunking this fraudulent science? The email closes with:

Edie Gilliss
Political Director, Washington Conservation Voters

PS: As fires continue to rage in Central Washington, and throughout the west, we are thankful to have, in our highest environmental office, a man committed to addressing the realities of climate change, since science has shown the link between bigger and more frequent fires and climate change. Please sign our petition now.

1) July 14, 2012, Whatcom Freedom Rally. 7/14/2012. Youtube.
2) Ex-NFLer Clint Didier tackles Murray, and a lot more,” Joel Connelly, 1/11/2010, Seattle PI.
3) Angry Crowd Enlivens County Meeting,” by Mark St. J. Couhig, 9/28/2011, Sequim Gazette.

I will not sign your petition, and we would not be having nearly the problem with the fires if someone who truly understood what freedom and liberty means, was allowing knowledgeable citizens to to manage the forests intelligently and productively. Clint Didier understands what freedom truly means. Vote for Clint!

Alien Invasion

Adapted from an email circulating on the Internet:

The year was 1947. Some of you will recall that on July 8, 1947, a little more than 64 years ago, numerous witnesses claim that an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) with five aliens aboard crashed onto a sheep and mule ranch just outside Roswell, New Mexico.

This is a well known incident that many say has long been covered up by the U.S. Air Force, as well as other federal agencies and organizations. However, what you may not know is that in the month of April 1948, nine months after the historic day, the following people were born:

• Barack Obama Sr.   
• Albert A. Gore, Jr.   
• Hillary Rodham   
• William J. Clinton   
• John F. Kerry   
• Howard Dean   
• Nancy Pelosi   
• Dianne Feinstein   
• Charles E. Schumer   
• Barbara Boxer   
• Joe Biden 

Coincidence? I think not. The email goes on to suggest that the aliens bred with the sheep and jack-asses, but that would be ludicrous, don't you think? I'm pretty sure these were their own kids.

(Thanks to my aunt and/or uncle for sending me the inspiration for this post.)

Arizona Pastor Arrested, Jailed for Holding Bible Study in Home

An Arizona pastor sits in jail because he was holding bible study sessions in his own home. This is America! We have the first amendment, freedom of religion and all that. How is this possible?

Here's how: where I live, there is a culture in the halls of the Whatcom County Courthouse; a mindset that says, "if it isn't permitted, it isn't permitted" -- meaning that if you don't have a permit to do something, then you're not permitted to do it. That same culture is evidently in force in parts of Arizona,

Phoenix City Prosecutor Vicki Hill said in a statement: “It came down to zoning and proper permitting. Anytime you are holding a gathering of people continuously as he does, we have concerns about people being able to exit the facility properly in case there is a fire, and that’s really all this comes down to.” (Read more...)

If it isn't permitted, it isn't permitted. Oh sure, they have their reasons. It's for our own good, of course. Nevermind the first amendment (any part -- freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of religion). If it isn't permitted, it isn't permitted. It's a $12,000 fine, or jail time. Pay up, sucka! I wonder if the ACLU will have anything to say about this.

In America, freedom used to be the default. Subject to common sense, responsibility and decency, we could do pretty much what we wanted, except in special cases where there were laws against it. No more. If it isn't permitted, it isn't permitted!

Remember This Song?

This song got a lot of airplay when I was a high school sophomore. I had no idea what a bizarro pair they were... Catchy tune, though...

The YouTube caption:

This is a rarely seen video recorded in 1972, recently shown on German Channel ZDF. Mouth & MacNeal were a pop duo from Holland. They formed in 1971 when record producer Hans van Hemert brought the solo talents of Mouth (born Willem Duyn, March 31, 1937) and Maggie MacNeal (born Sjoukje van't Spijker, May 5, 1950) together. Their biggest hit, "How Do You Do", eventually reached #8 in the U.S. in July 1972. The song spent 19 weeks in the Billboard Hot 100 and won a R.I.A.A. gold disc on August 2, 1972. Selling over a million copies in the U.S. alone, global sales exceeded two million.

This was back when men and women all had the same hair styles.

Romney's Free Market vs. Obama's Socialism

Thanks to Dave for sending me this.

The Picture Says It All

Thanks to Greg for sending me this.